Thoughts of Dave made Adam remember something he needed to do before keeping his rendezvous. He should give Carrie his brother’s cell phone number. If tonight’s showdown ended badly, Dave would know what to do. Of course, there was no way Adam was going to mention the worst-case scenario to Carrie. He’d just give her the number.
He pulled out his Ruger, ejected the magazine, checked the load. Would he need an extra magazine, more bullets? No, if ten rounds didn’t do it, he’d be dead. Adam pushed the thought aside. He slid the pistol into his ankle holster, pulled it out, then repeated the process until he was sure he could draw the gun easily when he needed it.
Adam opened his closet and found the Kevlar vest he’d purchased at the same time he bought the holster. It had resided in his closet to this point, but now was the time to wear it. He’d leave it on the bed until he left though.
Finally he pulled out his cell phone—the regular one—and made one last call. “Carrie, I’m about to leave for the cemetery.”
Her voice betrayed her anxiety. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“I don’t want to do it. I just don’t see any other options.”
“Will you call me when it’s over? Even if it’s late?”
“Sure.”
Adam gave her Dave’s number. “If anything bad happens . . .”
“Don’t say things like that,” Carrie said.
They talked for a few more minutes before Carrie said, “Adam, I love you.”
“And I love you, Carrie. When this is all over, I hope you’re ready to talk about our life together.”
“We can talk now,” she said.
“No, I need to get going. I’ll call you when it’s over.”
“Adam?”
“Yes?”
“Please be careful. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I don’t want to lose you either,” he said.
They exchanged more “I love you’s” before ending the conversation.
Then Adam donned the vest, checked his gun again, and did a final run-through of his mental checklist. Time to go. It was only ten thirty, but he wanted to be in place early.
Adam chose Ridgewood Cemetery as a meeting site for a number of reasons. It was older and full of tall monuments and a few mausoleums, so he could hide easily. Like most cemeteries there was a fence around it, but the gates were never locked. And it was isolated enough that a gunshot wouldn’t attract curious neighbors. Of course that gunshot could be from his gun or that of his stalker, but he was willing to take the chance. Anything to bring this nightmare to a close.
Adam had done some scouting, so he knew where he was going. He’d found an open barn for the storage of equipment and material, and that was where he concealed his Subaru, between a tractor with a bucket for digging on the front end and another that pulled a small mower. It took him ten minutes to work his way through the cemetery to the spot he’d picked for his observation post. He was just settling in when he heard a single, faint noise off to his left. It was more than an hour before the appointed time, but Adam expected the shooter to come early. He eased his pistol from its holster and began a slow belly crawl toward the noise.
A form materialized from the shadow of a mausoleum. Adam stayed in his prone position, raised himself on his elbows, and braced his gun in a firing position with both hands. He flicked off the safety and took up the slack on the trigger. Working to keep his voice steady and authoritative, he said, “That’s far enough. Put your hands up. If I see a gun, I’ll shoot.”
“Adam?”
Adam exhaled deeply, and he felt his heart start beating again. He eased his pressure on the trigger. “Carrie? What are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t let you do this by yourself. So I came to help.”
Adam dropped his voice to a whisper. “Get over here, and get down. We don’t want to alert the shooter.”
In a moment they were crouched behind the mausoleum Adam had chosen as his hiding place, peering around the low granite building toward the marble angel marking the McElroy plot. Adam thought about scolding Carrie for coming, but in truth, he was glad to see her. He put his mouth next to her ear and whispered, “Did you bring a weapon?”
She reached into the side pocket of her black cargo pants, pulled out a small canister, and held it up. “Mace,” she whispered.
The whine of a transmission alerted them to the approach of a vehicle. Bouncing headlights made the shadows dance as a light-colored SUV pulled up and stopped on the road near the McElroy plot. The driver killed the lights and lowered the window. He sat there for what Adam figured was five minutes, then the window buzzed up, the engine started, headlights flared, and the vehicle drove off.
“Could you see inside the SUV?” Adam asked.
“No,” Carrie said. “But I recognized the license plate as it drove away.”
“What was it?”
“It was a personalized Texas plate: HRT SRGN. It belongs to Phil Rushton.”
TWENTY-THREE
CARRIE FIGURED HER ADRENALINE LEVEL WAS SO HIGH SHE’D BE awake the rest of the night. Instead, she was dozing soundly when she felt Adam shaking her shoulder.
“Carrie, it’s one a.m.,” he whispered. “I don’t think anyone else is coming. Let’s go home.”
She smothered a yawn. “Okay. Can I get a ride with you?”
“Where’s your car?”
“I didn’t want to leave it here, so I took a taxi.”
“A taxi to the cemetery this late at night? Didn’t the driver think you were crazy?”
She shrugged, although she knew Adam couldn’t see it in the darkness. “I told him this was the anniversary of my husband’s death, and I planned to spend the night sitting by his grave.”
“Where did you come up with such a story?”
She climbed to her feet, using the edge of the mausoleum for leverage. “Actually, on the first anniversary of John’s death, I did just that—spent the night at the foot of his grave.” She pointed. “It’s right over there.” Her voice broke on the last words.
Adam took her arm. “Do you want a moment alone?”
There was a long moment of silence, then Carrie said in a small voice, “I’d like that.”
They walked several yards before she stopped and looked around. She took a few steps to the right and let her hand caress the edge of a simple granite marker. “John,” she whispered. Then she bowed her head and was silent for a moment. Adam placed a hand on her shoulder, but said nothing.
Carrie’s emotions were in turmoil. She was standing at the grave of her first husband, with the man who might become her second at her side. John, I did the best I could, but we couldn’t save you. Now it’s time for me to move on. I hope you understand.
Finally Carrie lifted her head, wiped her eyes, and said, “I’m ready to go now.”
When they reached his car, Adam unlocked it and held the door for Carrie before climbing in himself. He eased the vehicle out of its hiding place, flipped on his headlights, and turned onto the main road that ran through the cemetery.
Carrie turned toward him. “What do you think—”
Another set of headlights appeared on the horizon. Carrie saw them and dropped to the floor of the car at the same time Adam whispered, “Get down.”
“You can sit up,” he said in a moment. “I thought a car was coming right at us, but it was on the road leading here.”
“You know, it seems to me that I’ve spent more time on the floor of your car than a floor mat.” Carrie laughed. “I’m sort of tired of that.”
Adam turned out of the cemetery and set a course for Carrie’s house. “That makes two of us. Do you think we’re any closer to finding out who’s been shooting at us?”
“Maybe. Why would Phil Rushton take a drive into the cemetery tonight?” she said. “So far as I’m concerned, that makes him our number one suspect.”
“You’ve got a point. Do you think you can find out if he has some kind of excuse for coming
?”
For a moment, Carrie said nothing. Another spy job. Finally she said, “I’ll try.”
They rode in silence, until Adam said, “I didn’t have a chance to ask about your day.”
Despite the late hour, Carrie’s voice brightened. “Really interesting. Have you ever heard of something called commotio cordis?”
Carrie was no stranger to doing without sleep, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed it. The next morning was Saturday, a day when she tried to sleep a bit later if possible. But not today. Today she had to check on the young ballplayer she’d resuscitated the day before.
If his EKG was still normal and his cardiac enzymes showed no evidence of heart muscle damage, she planned to discharge him. He was understandably anxious to go home, so Carrie promised him she’d be by early this morning. Thus the reason she got up at what one of her medical school classmates referred to as “chicken thirty.”
When the alarm went off, she forced herself out of bed and padded to the kitchen, only to find she hadn’t prepared the coffee maker the night before. She fumbled her way through the process until the coffee started brewing. Then she stood over it until there was at least a cup’s worth in the carafe. By the time she’d showered, dressed, and chased a piece of buttered toast with two more cups of coffee, Carrie thought she might make it through the day.
At the hospital, she was moving down the hall toward the ballplayer’s room when a familiar voice stopped her. “Carrie, hold up a second.” Phil, a cardboard cup of coffee in one hand, a stack of papers in the other, was coming toward her full tilt.
Carrie turned and waited. Phil stopped so close to her that she smelled the fumes issuing from the Starbucks cup. She would have killed for some of that coffee but didn’t think Phil would share. Come to think of it, he wasn’t the kind to share anything. She put what she hoped was a neutral expression on her face and waited for him to speak.
“Your patient, Mr. . . . The man you referred, the one with the heart attack . . .”
“Mr. Hoover. A. J. Hoover,” she said. “What about him?”
“He came through the surgery very well. He’s in the SICU if you want to drop by. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to discharge him, but feel free to write any orders you think he might need.”
“Thanks,” Carrie said. “I’ll go by the surgical ICU and see him before I leave.” What was going on? It wasn’t like Phil to be this considerate. She expected that by now he’d have Thad Avery standing by to take over Hoover’s post-op care. She frowned, wondering when the other shoe would drop. Surely Phil wanted something.
“We never had a chance to talk about dinner. How about tonight?”
There it was—the shift from rigid taskmaster and senior partner to caring colleague who wanted to get closer to her. She still wasn’t comfortable going out with Phil, but she really wanted to follow up on his appearance in the cemetery last night.
“Phil, I think I’d better get some rest tonight. I was up really late.” She covered a yawn, a real one, although it did add plausibility to her story.
“Probably just as well to put off our dinner.” He yawned as well. “After I finished Mr. Hoover’s surgery, I had to take care of a patient with a gunshot wound to the chest. It was almost midnight by the time I left the hospital.”
Carrie waited. Go on. I’ve given you an opening. She raised her eyebrows in an invitation to tell her more.
“After the case I called home to check my messages. I usually don’t have any—the answering service calls me on my cell—but there was a strange one on my landline last night. It was from someone inviting me to a meeting at the cemetery at midnight. Well, curiosity got the best of me, so I swung by on the way home—stopped at the appointed place, but there was no one there.” He shrugged, then took a deep draught of coffee. “They must have called my phone by mistake.”
“That’s curious.” Carrie did her best to keep her expression neutral. “Do you have any idea who could’ve called?”
“Not really,” he said. But there was something behind his eyes Carrie couldn’t read. Was he lying? She couldn’t tell.
Carrie shrugged. “Well, that’s certainly weird. Anything else?”
Phil looked around. They were standing near the nurse’s station, and people were coming and going in a steady stream. “No, it can wait. Maybe I’ll see you later. If not, why don’t you drop by my office first thing Monday morning? We can talk about scheduling that dinner too. Right now I’m going home to take a nap.” He finished the coffee, tossed the empty cup into a wastebasket, and plodded off down the hall.
Carrie ended her rounds with a stop in the cafeteria. After inhaling the fumes from Phil’s coffee, she considered getting an espresso from the food court but decided to make the trade-off for plain coffee from a container that wasn’t cardboard, consumed at a real table in a relatively quiet setting. After a quick trip through the cafeteria line, she was at a table, holding a mug of coffee in both hands, smelling the aroma and feeling the caffeine energize her tired body. She closed her eyes, leaned back in her chair, and tried to analyze what she and Adam knew.
As she recalled, Phil Rushton once said he grew up in a poor part of Chicago. Like most medical students she was sure he either borrowed money or someone financed his medical education and specialty training. Could it have been DeLuca? Was Phil now repaying the debt by trying to kill Adam?
And Bruce Hartley, the senior lawyer in the partnership where Adam worked, had been in trouble for gambling. Could DeLuca have been the one to whom Hartley owed the debt? It seemed unlikely that he’d torch his own office, though what better way to direct suspicion away from himself? Adam said that if Hartley wanted someone shot, he’d hire it done. Still, so far as Carrie was concerned, he was a suspect.
To complicate things further, Charlie DeLuca had another family—a bigamous relationship with a woman living in a Chicago suburb. When the truth about Charlie came out, the wife had the marriage declared void and her daughter became a cloistered nun. The stepson, trained as an EMT, disappeared. Could he have surfaced in Jameson as Rob Cole? Was Rob Cole really Robert Kohler?
Carrie was halfway through her coffee when she realized someone was easing into the chair next to hers.
Rob Cole, looking like someone who had just finished pulling an all-nighter, smiled across the table and raised his cup in a salute. “Mind if I join you?”
“Tough night?” Carrie asked.
“Yes and no. I ended up working a double shift. One of the other paramedics was sick. But it turned out to be a good night. Took a mother in labor to the hospital just in time for the baby to be born somewhere besides the back of an MICU. And probably saved the life of a guy who got shot in the chest.”
“Dr. Rushton said he did surgery on a patient like that,” Carrie said. “So I guess your night wasn’t a total waste.”
Rob looked at the ceiling as though trying to decide. “No, it was okay. I had some other plans, fairly important ones, but I guess there’ll be another time.”
He started to push back his chair, but Carrie stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Rob, you got called away while we were still talking yesterday. Why don’t we finish that conversation?”
Rob eased back into his chair. “Honestly, I can’t remember what we were talking about.”
Carrie paused to gather her thoughts. She had to approach this carefully. “You were telling me about the reason you changed your name and moved away.”
“Oh yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess it was the total disappointment after I found out my stepfather really wasn’t my stepfather. I’d really taken to him. My sister and I were so happy to have a dad again. When we found out he had another family, that the whole marriage to my mom was a sham, my sister just cracked up. She decided she had to get away, so she cut all ties with us. She . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t talk about it.”
Carrie plastered a shocked look on her face. “That’s tough, Rob.” She took a deep breath. �
��I understand your need to get away for a fresh start, but why did you have to change your name?”
“Sis and I were proud of our new family. Mom’s husband said he wanted to be more than a stepfather. He wanted to be our father. Then we found out these terrible things about him. I . . . I ran away. I changed my name because it reminded me of what we had, what he made us lose.”
Carrie took a big swallow of coffee. Here it comes. “And what was your stepfather’s name?”
Rob hesitated so long she thought he was going to evade the question. Finally he spoke. “Du . . . Lu . . . It was Luciano.”
Carrie looked into Rob Cole’s eyes, hoping to find a clue there. Had he started to say “DeLuca,” then changed his mind? Or was the subject painful enough that he stuttered over his stepfather’s name. Was he toying with her? Was this simply a part of the game for him, a game that would end with a bullet for Adam . . . or her . . . or both?
Carrie decided to take a chance and attack the problem head-on. “Rob, I don’t think your stepfather was named Luciano. I think his name was DeLuca. Charlie DeLuca.”
Rob reached out for his coffee cup, but instead of grasping the handle, he encircled the thick mug with his hand. He didn’t lift it—just squeezed. Carrie watched his hands tremble and his knuckles turn white. She was afraid the mug would shatter, and she shoved her chair back a few inches to avoid the splatter of hot liquid. When she looked up from the cup into Rob’s eyes, they were burning into hers. For a moment she thought he might hit her, or throw the cup at her, or lunge across the table and grab her by the throat.
Carrie was on the verge of calling out for help, when, like a balloon deflating, Rob relaxed back into his chair. He leaned forward so that their faces were just inches apart. “I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore. And I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to get to know you better after all.”
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